The Jungle Book

High in the Seeonee hills, Father Wolf woke at dusk, stretched, and prepared to go hunting for the night, while Mother Wolf lay in their cave with their four cubs tumbling and squeaking around her.Moonlight streamed in through the mouth of the cave, and the little family had just settled into a peaceful evening when a visitor arrived.It was Tabaqui the jackal, a sly, whining creature that the wolves neither liked nor fully trusted, for he carried gossip and trouble wherever he went.

“Shere Khan, the Big One, has shifted his hunting grounds,” Tabaqui announced. “He means to hunt among these hills for the rest of the moon.”Father Wolf’s eyes flashed with anger, for it was against the law of the jungle for a tiger to hunt on another pack’s ground without warning.Mother Wolf only sniffed, unimpressed. “He is lame in one foot from hunting cattle instead of wild game,” she said, “and lame tigers make loud, careless enemies.”

Far off in the valley, the wolves heard the tiger’s rough, angry roar echoing off the rocks, and Father Wolf rose to keep watch at the cave’s mouth.But instead of a tiger, something small and warm and entirely unexpected came stumbling into the firelight — a naked human baby, walking on all fours and laughing up at Father Wolf without a trace of fear.“A man’s cub!” Father Wolf said, startled into stillness. “I have never seen one so close. Look at him — he is not afraid of us at all.”

Mother Wolf nosed her own cubs aside and pulled the man-cub gently in among them, where he nestled against her warm side as though he had always belonged there.“He shall not be harmed,” she said firmly. “I will call him Mowgli, the Frog, and he shall run with the Pack and hunt with the Pack, just as my own cubs do.”Father Wolf said nothing, but he did not argue — once Mother Wolf had decided something, there was little any wolf in Seeonee could do to change her mind.

Moments later, Shere Khan’s huge striped head and shoulders blocked the entrance to the cave, and behind him Tabaqui’s thin voice urged him on.“The man’s cub is mine,” Shere Khan growled. “Give him to me, for his people will come with fire and guns if you hide him among your cubs.”Mother Wolf stepped forward, her eyes shining like two green moons in the dark, and stood squarely between the tiger and her new son.

“The man’s cub is mine now, Lungri,” she answered, using his most insulting nickname, “mine to keep, mine to run with the Pack — and one day, lame hunter, it is he who will hunt you!”Shere Khan’s roar shook the cave, but he could not fight past a mother wolf defending her own, and at last he backed slowly away into the night.From that night on, the man-cub Mowgli grew up among the wolves of Seeonee, the first of many strange chapters in his life in the jungle.